I am continuing on my Jurgen Moltmann re-read period, and now I am at the very early stages of reading ‘The Way of Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions’.

Nostalgia is a dangerous thing. We tend to do it with false idealistic notions controlling how we see the world whether it be today or in the past. I have read somewhere ‘Nostalgia is the death of the local church’, in fact I have seen it for myself where there is an over-riding desire to cling onto the ‘good old days’, but they never were that good really. ‘Do you remember when….’ often shows a journey that didn’t really move very far, and it doesn’t have much future for those same reasons. Moltmann says this on page 10:

“The new beginning awakes the happiest memories of the past, but it does not lead back into that past. It transforms the remembrance into a still greater hope. There is more in the new messianic David than there ever was in he historical David of old. So to transform the image of the king into the image of the messiah is not to idealize the past. On the contrary, it mobilizes the people to set forward afresh, hoping n God. This difference between past and future is constitutive for the messianic hope; and out of it is born what we have to call ‘eschatological’ hope. – Jurgen Moltmann, The Way of Christ: Christology in Messianic Dimensions. SCM Press, 1990. p10-11.